Tiger Memory Usage
2005 May 8
It seems as though MacOSX 10.4 is a wee bit memory hungry… My Powerbook has a gig of RAM, and I’ve been stuck in VM thrash hell for several minutes on a couple of occasions (which hadn’t happened at all since I upgraded to 1GB from 256MB while running 10.3). I don’t recall exact memory usage on 10.3, but Safari alone is filling up almost 200MB of real memory, with almost half a gig of VM. 4 instances of the Weather dashboard widget suck up almost 90MB of real memory each, totalling a whopping 1GB of VM.
I’m hoping I’m misreading this, or if it is a real issue, that it will be resolved in an update somehow…
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You’re not misreading Activity Monitor, but it seems odd your memory usage is so high. Safari 2.0′s memory usage is very similar to Safari 1.3 in Panther for me. It hovers around 55 MB with two windows open. As for Dashboard, my current widgets are using:
Weather: 8.73 MB Calendar: 9.05 MB Calculator: 5.36 MB
Maybe a reboot would help? My home Mac only has 448 MB of RAM, and Tiger’s been extremely smooth and fast!
I just relaunched Safari, and it’s “real memory” footprint dropped to 33MB. Seems like something’s a bit leaky… Now, is there any way to relaunch the Dashboard without logging out? (ok… I’ll reboot the laptop in the morning
)
I don’t seem to have the numbers you have. But a I have to say, widgets are at least very virtual memory hungry. I have only 4 weather widgets running. They each take up about 7-10MB of real RAM. That’s cool. But they also each eat up over 100MB of virtual memroy. What’s up with that. I’m not a programer, just a lowly admin. But that VM usaage seems aweful high. Than goodness for 2GB of RAM and fast drives on my G5 at work. I seriously doubt I’ll fare as well on my G4/466 with 768MB of RAM at home……
A sudo killall -HUP Dashboard or similar should do the trick.
Relax about that virtual memory (vm) listings, check the swapfiles at /var/vm/, most probably (if you have some RAM still free) there will be only one swapfile (swapfile0) of size 64MB, which is kind of default and is created on startup.
Get iPulse or some other monitor to check real vm disk access… you will see the disk is not being used for swapping at all under normal circumstances (about 50-100 MB of free RAM).
To be honest I don’t know why the OS “reserves” so much vm for each app… but it’s clear that it is not used. I realized this when the total vm size was bigger than my unused disk space.
But Tiger clearly uses more RAM than Panther did… at least it qualifies a lot as “unused”. Anyone with more understanding on this field?
salut
to restart dashboard, open up activity monitor, and quit, not force quit the dock app. DAshboard is tied into the dock, so the dock+dash will restart almost intstantaneously
to restart dashboard, open up activity monitor, and quit, not force quit the dock app. DAshboard is tied into the dock, so the dock+dash will restart almost intstantaneously
but yes i have had this problem….
COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
DashboardC 0.0% 0:01.93 3 101 262 10.9M 15.2M 12.0M 239M
DashboardC 0.0% 0:01.50 3 97 242 4.52M 10.2M 6.35M 227M
DashboardC 0.0% 0:09.53 3 99 248 9.77M 12.4M 12.3M 217M
DashboardC 0.0% 0:00.74 3 94 247 4.50M 10.5M 6.11M 225M
DashboardC 0.0% 0:00.56 4 173 253 2.09M 9.46M 4.23M 222M
DashboardC 0.0% 0:01.27 3 81 301 6.80M 11.3M 8.10M 230M
DashboardC 0.0% 0:02.79 3 96 261 4.79M 13.3M 7.11M 230M
Dock 0.0% 0:08.68 2 162 346 4.87M 38.2M 19.9M 249M
COMMAND name of program (widgets are DashboardClientWidgetName) %CPU percent of CPU used TIME how long the process has been going
TH number of threads
PRTS number of ports
MREGS ????
RPRVT Private Memory RSHRD Shared Memory RSIZE Real RaM used VSIZE Virtual Memory size
I have 2GB of RAm so its not a huge deal, but still.. the hula girl widget gobbles up 300+ VM?????
hope this helps …
dan
dan@therevered.us
quitting the dock to restart dashboard works like a charm!
Ah, cool. Thanks for the tip, Kim! I’ll have to add a
killall Dockto my crontabi have the same problem with my g5 imac that has 1gb of ram.
People are being overly worried about Virtual Memory (VM). That’s what it is: virtual. So it’s not using up resources other than perhaps disk space.
Also, probably you don’t even need to worry unduly about Dashboard using up a lot of memory either. When it’s not being used the RAM will be ‘Inactive’, and as soon as you launch something that needs that RAM, Dashboard’s memory will be swapped out.
Yes, it’s virtual, but it seems like actually freeing it up or swapping it out can take a serious hit. I’ve had what can only be VM swapping last over 2 minutes! Maybe my drive is highly fragmented, or something else may be interfering, but that’s waaaaay too long to make VM thrashing a trivial thing for me.
I just disabled Dashboard. I can easily do without it, and it DOES gobble lots of system resources.
If you’d like to disable Dashboard, here’s how:
http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macosxhints/2005/08/disabledashboard/index.php
I’m having similar problems, but Safari is using 3.5 GB of virtual memory with 2 windows open. I keep getting the whirling wheel lasting a few minutes. I have a PowerBook G4 w/ 1.5 GB of RAM.